Veiling and Unveiling: Vulnerability and Self-Protection in Mohja Kahf's Work

The paper takes into examination the issues of vulnerability and resistance in Mohja Kahf’s work. Even before the 9/11 attacks made vulnerability – the limits of its representation, ways to counteract it, its unequal geopolitical distribution – an issue of public debate, Kahf’s Emails from Scheherazad had offered a deep, multifaceted, and transnational exploration of it. The paper analyzes Kahf’s representation of Arab and Arab American vulnerability in relation to diaspora, to Orientalist discursive practices suffered by Muslim American women, to war and terrorism. Kahf’s reflections on violence, loss, and responsibility, anticipating Judith Butler’s ethics of grief, invites readers to re-think vulnerability as interdependence, and consider the self’s innate porosity to the other as a source for an ethical encounter.